Tech news can help you understand and adapt to important technological, economic,
and sociocultural shifts that affect all of us.
But why keep up with it at all?
It's a good question.
Hell, if I know, Nintendo has updated their user agreements
to let gamers know they might break your switch
if you screw around with it. Because as much as they love to sue people,
it's like their favorite thing other than releasing the same game a million times,
it's just faster to remotely disable people's consoles.
And along with it, their ability to legally play Nintendo's games.
Hold on. As first spotted by Steven Toteo at gamefile,
the old Nintendo account agreement for US accounts
forbade a long list of jailbreak-y actions
like copying, modifying, and decompiling Nintendo services.
But the new agreement goes into more detail and notes that failing to comply with these restrictions
may cause Nintendo to render your account and or Nintendo device permanently unusable
in whole or in part. I don't know what that last part is, like they might break only your joy-con sticks,
make them worse than they already are. The UK version of the agreement is a bit softer,
saying non-compliance may result in the console becoming unusable.
My appen might not stop. Nintendo also updated their privacy policy
in the US and UK to say they might monitor and record your video and audio interactions
with other users. So just make sure you get all the swearing out
of your system before you sit down to play online, okay?
NVIDIA is reportedly once again refusing to give tech reviewers official drivers for the RTX 5060
until the card launches on May 19th.
Igor's lab first made this claim, but it was corroborated by Hardware Unboxed
and Andrea Schilling of Hardware Lux, who pointed out NVIDIA's plan sucks extra hard
because May 19th is the first day of Computex
and everybody's gonna be in Taiwan, possibly enjoying delicious soup dumplings
and bubble tea, which is not important right now. What's important is we're looking at another launch day
filled potentially with videos of short sandaled people
complaining about not being able to publish a review. Thanks, NVIDIA.
Honestly, the Radeon RX9060XT, listings of which leaked recently,
revealing both eight gig and 16 gig variants, can't come soon enough, please.
Let line is review something, anything. Apple has filed a motion to stay that ruling
from last week, forcing the tech giant to allow external payment options on iOS,
even though Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers explicitly said she would not grant a stay
and that she is generally sick of Apple's shenanigans.
That's my paraphrasing. But you see, Apple had no choice but to try something
because if they don't collect all the commissions they can,
even on purchases made outside of the app store, they could lose hundreds of millions,
even billions of dollars, which I believe was the whole idea, but I could be wrong.
Obviously Epic Games thinks Apple's motion is BS.
The company just submitted the Fortnite iOS app to Apple for review once again.
And again, I feel like it won't be approved,
but I appreciate Tim Sweeney's spirit. Meanwhile, Apple SVP Eddie Q made a spirited argument
in the Google search antitrust remedies trial, asserting that Google should still be allowed
to pay Apple 20 billion a year to be Safari's default search engine
because search won't even be relevant soon anyway.
I mean, people are using it less because they're using AI to search for stuff instead.
Now Google didn't love the sound of that, so they posted a short statement to say,
ah, well, hey, just hold on now.
We're still seeing overall query growth in search.
So I mean, Google's still a big deal. And then Apple's like, no, it's not.
And then Google's like, yes, it is. Anyway, Eddie even went so far as to say,
you may not even need an iPhone by 2035
because AI is changing how people use the web so much.
In fact, the changes are so big, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince,
they're killing the internet's entire business model.
I mean, the tides are changing. Winds are shifting, your honor.
There are probably a lot of things we should be worrying about instead of Google
paying Apple 20 billion dollars, so probably just keep letting them do that, okay?
I mean, why not? I know why tech news is useful.
No idea what the quick bits are for. An AI generated video of a man killed
in a road rage incident in Arizona was played during the killer's trial
and accepted by the judge as a victim impact statement.
The video was produced by the victim's sister and features the man saying he believes in forgiveness
despite his family asking the judge to deliver the maximum sentence.
After hearing the testimony, the judge said he didn't hear the victim
asking for the maximum sentence, probably because that wasn't actually the victim.
It was a fake person. Does everyone realize that? And then the judge handed out the max sentence anyway.
Okay, so not sure what we learned from any of this.
Huawei showed off its first laptops running a desktop version of its Harmony OS operating system.
The Chinese tech giant first started developing Harmony OS as an Android based alternative
to reduce their reliance on Google and now they're trying to reduce dependence on Microsoft too
because of the US-China trade war and also probably because they're sick of the constant
nagging to upgrade to Windows 11. In case you missed it, there's a new Pope in town
and yeah, he's a gamer, kind of.
Robert Pravos, aka Pope Leo XIV
is the first American Pope and the first one confirmed to play video games,
specifically Wordle and Words with Friends, according to his biological gamer, Bros.
He's also the first Pope that can be properly stocked on social media.
Evidence has already been discovered of him arguing with his relatives on Facebook.
He's just like us. And a viral TikTok trend called the Chromebook Challenge
in which kids stick objects into the USB ports
of their school-issued Chromebooks to elicit a bit of magic smoke
has unsurprisingly led to fires and evacuations
at schools in multiple states. As one TikTok video points out,
blowing up your Chromebook may lead to a situation where it ain't even a Chromebook anymore.
Important lessons learned. Searching Chromebook Challenge on TikTok
now leads to a TikTok page warning against participating in such challenges,
which they needed to do because the fire challenge was already a thing
and that involved kids pouring flammable liquid on themselves
and then lighting that liquid on fire. What is the challenge there?
To survive? Thankfully, kids have already pivoted to finding new and creative ways
to screw with their Chromebook settings, making the laptop hard to use the old-fashioned way.
Maybe the kids are all right. Maybe the kids are all right.
But I won't be all right unless you come back on Monday for more tech news.
I'll just be sitting here worried sick that you're doing something less useful,
like touching grass or other things that are outside.
Your hands might get dirty.